y, and it was this process that people called
living. Perhaps, then, every one really knew as she knew now where they
were going; and things formed themselves into a pattern not only for
her, but for them, and in that pattern lay satisfaction and meaning.
When she looked back she could see that a meaning of some kind was
apparent in the lives of her aunts, and in the brief visit of the
Dalloways whom she would never see again, and in the life of her father.

The sound of Terence, breathing deep in his slumber, confirmed her in
her calm. She was not sleepy although she did not see anything very
distinctly, but although the figures passing through the hall became
vaguer and vaguer, she believed that they all knew exactly where they
were going, and the sense of their certainty filled her with comfort.
For the moment she was as detached and disinterested as if she had
no longer any lot in life, and she thought that she could now accept
anything that came to her without being perplexed by the form in which
it appeared. What was there to frighten or to perplex in the prospect
of life? Why should this insight ever again desert her? The world was in
truth so large, so hospitable, and after all it was so simple. "Love,"
St. John had said, "that seems to explain it all." Yes, but it was not
the love of man for woman, of Terence for Rachel. Although they sat so
close together, they had ceased to be little separate bodies; they had
ceased to struggle and desire one another. There seemed to be peace
between them. It might be love, but it was not the love of man for
woman.

Through her half-closed eyelids she watched Terence lying back in his
chair, and she smiled as she saw how big his mouth was, and his chin
so small, and his nose curved like a switchback with a knob at the end.
Naturally, looking like that he was lazy, and ambitious, and full of
moods and faults. She remembered their quarrels, and in particular
how they had been quarreling about Helen that very afternoon, and she
thought how often they would quarrel in the thirty, or forty, or fifty
years in which they would be living in the same house together, catching
trains together, and getting annoyed because they were so different. But
all this was superficial, and had nothing to do with the life that
went on beneath the eyes and the mouth and the chin, for that life was
independent of her, and independent of everything else. So too, although
she was going to marry him and